Phantom Unread Message in Messages

[Makosuke]

This may have been asked elsewhere, but the only similar questions I can find are for the iPhone.

My Mac Messages app has 1 phantom unread message. I can work my way through the whole list of conversations and none have a blue dot; selecting each in turn also doesn't fix it. Rebooting removes it temporarily, but it always comes back. The unread count does update--if I get a new message it increments--but it will never count down below 1.

The phantom message is apparently in my T-Mobile text bill announcements. I say this because if I right click on the Dock icon, it shows "456 (1 unread)" at the top (456 is the T-Mobile bill announce text number), and if I select that it jumps to that conversation.

However, there's nothing unread there. In fact, even if I right click on the conversation and permanently delete it, the Dock icon still shows that same conversation. (Selecting "456 (1 unread)" from the dock right-click menu after deleting the conversation brings the window forward with nothing selected.) I also tried scrolling through the whole conversation on my iPhone and deleting it there, still no luck.

Any suggestions? I'd kind of like to avoid purging all past conversations by wiping preferences, and I'm not sure that would fix it anyway.

 

[casten]

I have found that by quitting the iMessage app on my Mac I can temporarily clear this "unread" message by opening Terminal and pasting in "killall Dock" and it'll go away. Hope this helps.

 

[BrianBaughn]

I have found that by quitting the iMessage app on my Mac I can temporarily clear this "unread" message by opening Terminal and pasting in "killall Dock" and it'll go away. Hope this helps.

Just had to do this today.

 

[Makosuke]

Yeah, killing the Dock has the same effect as a reboot, but it's not actually fixing the problem, just temporarily hiding it. Since it shows up on neither phones nor other Macs linked to the same account, I figure it must be database corruption. Fixing the database without trashing the entire message history is the trick.

Peripherally related, an annoying side effect of killing the dock is that it will bump any windows you had minimized out of minimization if you don't remember to quit that app first--I ended up with like a dozen "I'll look at this later" Safari windows all over the place last time I was experimenting.

 

[thenickberry]

Yeah, killing the Dock has the same effect as a reboot, but it's not actually fixing the problem, just temporarily hiding it. Since it shows up on neither phones nor other Macs linked to the same account, I figure it must be database corruption. Fixing the database without trashing the entire message history is the trick.

After doing the "killall Dock", I was able to see the unread messages responsible for the unread message count.

 

[Makosuke]

After doing the "killall Dock", I was able to see the unread messages responsible for the unread message count.

Interesting--sounds like the opposite of the behavior I see.

Although I can also see the responsible thread(s -- there were two), it doesn't do any good, since there are no actual unread messages in those threads, and viewing them doesn't change the unread status.

Weirdly, it may have resolved itself recently; I haven't seen the phantom message notification pop up for a few days now. I'm wondering if something I did (or just time?) inadvertently caused Messages to rebuild its database or something.